Month: April 2016

(credit: Withings)

Nokia has confirmed plans to acquire French smart watch and fitness gizmo maker Withings for £132 million (~€170 million, $190 million) in an all-cash offer.

After selling off its mobile phone business and Here maps division, Nokia seems to be returning to consumer-facing products once again with its planned buyout.

France-based Withings was founded in 2008, and since then has released a number of connected health appliances, including smart watches, fitness trackers, thermometers, and baby monitors, among other gadgets.

Video edited by Jenifer Hahn. (video link)

OCOTILLO WELLS, Calif.—The area of the Southern California desert we were standing in made for a decent visual fill-in for the Red Planet—simply change the tint of the landscape and get rid of the sparse scrub on the nearby hillsides. At this site in a large, open-air mine near the Salton Sea, a few people in hard hats were gathered around a tall stand with a tether in the middle that dropped into a small hole in the ground.

The area was silent except for a hum of a large compressor. "That's for cooling," explained Kris Zacny, an engineer for Honeybee Robotics. "We won't need cooling on Mars."

Photos used in Dvach's doxing campaign. (credit: Tjournal.ru)

This story originally appeared on Global Voices Advocacy

The developers behind “FindFace,” which uses facial recognition software to match random photographs to people’s social media pages on Vkontakte, say the service is designed to facilitate making new friends. Released in February this year, FindFace started gaining popularity in March, after a software engineer named Andrei Mima wrote about using the service to track down two women he photographed six years earlier on a street in St. Petersburg. (They’d asked him to take a picture of them, but he never got their contact information, so he wasn’t able to share it with them, at the time.)

From the start, FindFace has raised privacy concerns. (Even in his glowing recommendation, Mima addressed fears that the service further erodes people’s freedoms in the age of the Internet.) In early April, a young artist named Egor Tsvetkov highlighted how invasive the technology can be, photographing random passengers on the St. Petersburg subway and matching the pictures to the individuals’ Vkontakte pages, using FindFace. “In theory,” Tsvetkov told RuNet Echo, this service could be used by a serial killer or a collector trying to hunt down a debtor.”